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JoAnne Thrax

July 13, 2008

Christmas. I hate Christmas. The compulsory gift-giving, the monthlong frenzy of crass commercialism and godawful pervasive music, the tacky decorations, the senseless treeslaughter, the theological indoctrination, the eggnog-clouded family get-togethers, the unholy bastard spawn of religion and capitalism, more annoying even than each separately. Some people like Christmas. They like the hassle of the shopping, think gaudy decorations are wonderful, revel in the ceaseless torment of christmas carols, look forward eagerly to the inevitable disappointment of annual stunt-casted Chrit'mas specials on the telly, and after it all careens to a disastrous end, they set their sights on the next nationalistic and/or religious ceremony with unabated glee. I think the world can roughly be split between people who don't like Christmas and those who do (and the billion or so people who live somewhere it isn't a particularly big deal), and with the exception of those who’ve a decent reason (prepubescence, medication), I don’t think I’ve ever gotten along with people who like Christmas.

Well, I, for one, was hoping for more.

Which is the only way I can really understand the reaction to Journey’s End, which has polarised fandom more than any episode this series. Between the shallow spectacle and the shiny baubles and the anaemic paeans to the "true believers", many fans in their religious fervour feel that it is blasphemy to look over this tinsel-strewn wasteland and fail to be converted. (My reaction to this is pictured on the right.)

Well, I, for one, was hoping for more.

Doctor Who: Journey's End

Not expecting it, mind you, just hoping for it. I ended my last review with a cliffhanger, when I threatened to reveal what I thought of the cliffhanger. Partly this is because I thought it a wee bit clever; partly it's because I was too damn tired to bother trying to hammer out those extra few paragraphs; partly because time was running short; but mainly it's because I didn't want to heap praise on The Stolen Earth's spectacular cliffhanger when I felt pretty sure the resolution would fail to live up to my exacting standards, and, indeed, any standards at all.

Well, Russell T. Davies, you didn't disappoint me...and so I was disappointed. Predictably, Journey's End kicks off with startlingly poor resolutions to all three of last week's cliffhangers. Whether it's the magical hand of convenience, Jackie and Mickey's far-too-convenient materialization, or the method of conveniently writing Gwen and Ianto out of the rest of the episode, each seems like a disappointing cop-out. The density of dei ex machina in the first two minutes alone is almost enough to cause the entire episode to collapse into a black hole of arbitrary plotting. Mind you, RTD had sort of written himself into a corner here. There was no convenient Chekhov's gun lying around from earlier narratives to resolve any of the predicaments. I'd rather hoped there was something I missed and I'd be in awe of the clever escape; instead RTD just pulled rabbits out of his arse in some sort of perverse magical theatre.

Viva la Resolucion!:

The crap resolutions went well beyond the first two minutes, unfortunately. Davies has been dropping leaden hints on us all season, from Donna's hearing of heartbeats to Dalek Caan squealing and giggling about the death of the Doctor's "most faithful companion", and all seemed to land with a dull thud. In fact, the only resolutions that weren't crap were those many things that weren't resolved at all.

The least satisfying non-resolutions of the episode, and Davies' grossest derelictions of his duties as a scriptwriter, all converged on Donna. After weeks of playing up her importance ("the most important woman in the universe!") and dropping bollocks like "the pattern's not complete. The strands are still drawing together. But heading for what?" and every species in the universe predicting great things for her, we were a bit stirred up. Fans and casual viewers alike have been whipped into a frenzy, ropey strands of saliva falling from the corners of our mouths as we hurl our theories about who Donna might be and why all timelines seem to be leading to her, like so many monkeys hurling their feces at each other.

...all it requires is half-a-dozen incontinent macaques with a Speak-and-Spell...

Well, I'm sad to say, the ideas we've all been flinging about are infinitely better than the steaming pile of exposition RTD actually serves up for our consumption. The Doctor's heartbeat "rippled back, converging on" Donna because the Doctor's "complicated" and Donna's "special". A Dalek faerie has been manipulating the timelines...but the result was inevitable anyway? Why? Because Donna was "so unique."? That's all you could come up with, you incompetent bastard? Some sort of Donna-specific version of the already questionable Anthropic Principle? It's some sort of Destiny? Donna's the Chosen One? Bah. It's like that old adage about the infinite number of monkeys with the infinite number of typewriters...except that all it requires is half-a-dozen incontinent macaques with a Speak-and-Spell to best this pathetic cop-out.

The Naked Time(lord):

Since all of the universe seemed to be working together to foreshadow Donna's greatness, it was the least Davies could do to come up with a sufficiently over-the-top threat and implausible conclusion. Not content with merely taking over the entire universe, Davros and his friends have designed a machine that will obliterate anything and everything in all possible universes, and it's apparently fueled and propagated by 27 planets in careful balance.

The Supreme Dalek sets the mechanism for his own destruction in motion through the use of a cartoonish trap-door in the floor of the crucible, dropping Donna and the TARDIS through a long amusement-park ride into a furnace. While the TARDIS is bobbing up and down in a pool of zed-neutrinos (think of it as Doctor Who's own "trash compactor" scene), Murray Gold appears to Donna and tempts her into touching the pickled meat, setting up the episode's most important deus ex machina: the Biological Metacrisis. More of a Logical Metacrisis, the Doctor's hand is, understandably, aroused by Catherine Tate's touch, and grows into what I will heretofore refer to as "the Naked Doctor", and apparently the two of them have tainted each other in the process.

...understandably, aroused by Catherine Tate's touch...

The scenes of the Naked Doctor and Donna aping each other in the TARDIS are actually among the most enjoyable of the episode, and, of course, this entire contrivance eventually sets us up the Surreality Bomb that solves all of the universe's problems. Fortunately for the universe, Clever Donna possessed that magical human X-factor, lever-pressing-skills and the ability to shout scientificky-sounding things, allowing her to tits-up the Dalek plan in a matter of seconds, and right on time. (David Tennant yelling at the Dalek Empire to "cut it out! Just, please, stop it!" seemed to be meeting with limited success.) The final defeat of the Daleks' plan largely consisted of the Doctor,
the Doctor-Donna, and the Naked Doctor spouting endless nonsense and flicking switches
and turning knobs. The convenient Dalek-control-panel might have qualified as a Checkhov's gun, except that it was only revealed when needed, making it essentially a machina ex machina. The level of teachno-babble was ratcheted up so high in Journey's End my ears hurt, but without it the writer might have actually had to, in the words of the Supreme Dalek, "Explain! Explain! Explain!"

Orgy of Caanibalism:

What a bunch of rubbish were the Cult of Skaro, eh? Some elite force of Dalek superheroes they turned out to be. First we have Dalek Sec engaging in bestiality with the lower life forms, and now Dalek Caan brings back the entire bloody species from oblivion, just so he can sell them out. And for what? Shits and giggles, apparently. Mostly giggles. And a squeal or two. And rubbing his tentacles together maliciously, like a pantomime villain.

The other modern Daleks may still have compulsory-exposition problems
(why is it that Daleks can't seem to do anything without saying it out
loud! "Commence Disposal! Incinerate!"), but at least I know where
they're coming from. Why have you forsaken me, Dalek Caan?

I sort of enjoyed his mad rantings in The Stolen Earth, but when it's revealed that he's not only already seen Journey's End (the poor bastard!), but apparently he script-edited it as well (the bastard!), I lost my enthusiasm. One part carny fortune teller ("reading is free for red hair!") and two parts mad puppet-master, his theoretical string-pulling and, apparently, unlimited power, just seemed another way to dance around actual plotting in favour of magical, unexplainey contrivance.

The Impossible Planet:

Perhaps the nadir of the episode, in terms of just plain embarrassing, nausea-inducing awfulness, was the lengthy bit when the Doctor and his little team help a wayward planet find its way home. They literally tow it, for fuck's sake. Maybe this is just intended to give Torchwood and Luke Smith something to do after being grounded for the rest of the episode, or it's an excuse to pull K-9 out of the closet for a few more seconds to hump Mr. Smith's leg. Either way, it hurt just watching it.

To add insult to injury, the entire sequence is accompanied by some of the more abominable music Murray Gold has coughed up since 2005. It seems to combine the worst elements of both "Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles" and "Up with People". As they drop the hurtling Earth offhandedly back into its groove, everyone claps and hugs, The Earthlings all cheer and flail about and jump around like idiots, celebrating despite untold millions dead from the Dalek invasion. Governments the world over set off their strategic fireworks stockpiles. The ridiculous upbeatness is the same miserable excess I cited in my review for The Poison Sky, as "obnoxiously, hollowly uplifting," and it fares no better here.

Revelation of the Bollocks:

Another fine example of Davies dropping the spanner was the whole let-down of the Doctor's terrible secret. While most of the interminably talky episode consisted of tedious exposition, the scene where Davros gathers all of the Doctor's companions into some sort of shouty group therapy session falls far short of its goal. After a lengthy buildup about, to quote a tentacled muppet, "revealing the Doctor's soul", Davros's grand scheme apparently involves Daleks on parade in some sort of synchronized-swimming display and some sort of self-help based psychoanalysis of the Doctor.

The worst part of this is that the Doctor seemed to actually be bothered by it. When Davros is gleefully thrashing about screaming, "The man who abhors violence, never carrying a gun...but this is
the truth, Doctor. You take ordinary people and you fashion them into
weapons. Behold your children of time, transformed into murderers. I
made the Daleks, Doctor, you made this.", an appropriate response might have been "You've got to be fucking kidding me." I would have to assume that Davros was just taking the piss with lines like "This is my final victory, Doctor...I have shown
you...yourself!", but instead David Tennant gets all misty-eyed and has a series of flashbacks to mostly-RTD-scripted episodes from the last three or four years set to maudlin music.

The whole suggestion that Davros was going to reveal something deep and interesting about the Doctor was just another false promise in a script rife with the reddest of herrings, gaping plot wounds, implausible contrivances and poor science. What's with the Doctor and Davros misusing the term "wavelength"? These guys are supposed to be smart. Much as everyone feared, the stars all going out at once, with no consideration for the time it takes light to travel anywhere, was the "I wouldn't know science if it bit me in the arse" error it first appeared to be. What was the point of rounding up guinea pigs to test the reality bomb on, except as a contrivance to get Jackie, Mickey and Sarah Jane up to the crucible? What was Jackie shooting at in the sky when she first beamed over from the parallel universe? Oh...and in space, no one can hear you drop a spanner.

The Pretention Cannon:

It's almost a given now that Martha continues her unbearable-streak she's been on since at least The Last of the Time Lords. As usual, she's hobbled by most of the episodes most atrociously hamfisted dialogue ("Yeah, but I've got a higher authority, way above UNIT. And there's one more thing the Doctor would do."), but Freema Agyeman's affected line-reading doesn't improve matters. I think she may have borrowed Rose's new teeth for the duration of the Crisis on Impotent Earth. It's as if she's settled on portraying the character as a grim, serious, emotionally-disabled automaton, which may have some narrative justification, but sucks away all of the fun and appeal that the character used to have.

She may convince us she's the kind of self-important git who would set
off the Doomsday device, but she can't seem to convince us to give a
damn.

Not much else about the episode works in her favour either. Entire scenes delivered in German almost as poorly pronounced as her English; Harper's unusual depth-of-field games when she repels her mother with her outflung fingers; a costume that consists of a parachute complete with ripcord; shouting "noooooooooooo...!" as the Daleks defuse her insignificant threat with their transmat.

She may convince us she's the kind of self-important git who would set off the Doomsday device, but she can't seem to convince us to give a damn. She'll fit in perfectly on Torchwood; let's hope they don't feel the need to bring her back to Doctor Who any time soon.

Sloppy Seconds:

Speaking of returning guest-stars, Rose's is one casket Davies should never have re-opened. Rose's "arc" ended (excellently) two seasons ago, and Rose getting her pet doctor in Journey's End (Frank beat me to the wording, but, really, no other words will do) pisses all over the far more satisfactory Doomsday.

The argument that the Naked Doctor needs Rose Tyler to heal him, or even that eliminating the Daleks makes him need healing at all, remains thoroughly unconvincing, and the treacley mess on the beach just comes across as an excuse to throw the Rose/Doctor shippers a stale bone. If a "human-timelord biological metacrisis" can't survive, I was, of course, left wondering if the Doctor just left Rose cavorting with an impending corpse, instead of just a genocidal mockup of himself and the best temp in Chiswick. Even if he doesn't drop dead within hours, Rose isn't likely to be satisfied with the short end of the stick. After travelling the universe with the Doctor, she's isn't likely to be any more satisfied settling down with the Naked Doctor who works in a chip shop than Donna would be with being mind-raped and stranded back on Earth.

The Biggest Backfire in History:

Journey's End had a few redeeming features...there was
the...um...no...wait...I'll think of it...ooh, I've got it! Bernard
Cribbins didn't suck. Then again, he really never sucked, now did he? Well, how about the faux-German Daleks? They were entertaining. And, of course, there was Donna.

The final insult of Journey's End was Donna's terrible fate. Catherine Tate has been, easily, the best thing to happen to Doctor Who since at least sometime in the seventies. Donna was supposed to travel with the Doctor forever, more or less. She certainly deserved better than she got.

...like a schoolboy pulling the wings off of a butterfly...

The Doctor leaving Donna as an amnesiac ticking time-bomb is not a satisfying conclusion to her plot arc. Sure, it was emotionally devastating and all, and Tate's unparalleled acting sells the horror of it far more than anyone else could have. An actual death would have been a far more dignified coda for Donna (and would have actually lived up to Caan's prophecy of a companion death, unlike the annoying bait-and-switch Davies keeps pulling). In one fell swoop, like a schoolboy pulling the wings off of a butterfly, Davies has reduced Donna to the shallow caricature we all met with some trepidation in The Runaway Bride.

Donna's mantra about being "just a temp" led to a great deal of speculation among the fans ("...temp...tempus...time. She must be a time lord!"). That, of course, all turned out to be much ado about nothing, as the only thing that made her special was her accidental cross pollination with the Doctor. The end result of her character arc was to have no arc at all; she was just a placeholder. It's like the world's worst reset-button. You see, for Davies, Donna was just a temp all along.

July 05, 2008

In the wee hours of Sunday morning last weekend, in the aftermath of The Stolen Earth, after my initial "'the fuck was that?", I started to try to wrap my weary brain around what I thought of the episode.

Ever been to the circus? No, neither have I, but I have seen circuses portrayed in myriad films and television programmes, from La Strada to At the Circus to Series 25's The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, and let me tell you one thing: based on the evidence, those places are simply infested with clowns...and the penultimate episode of Season 4 of the born-again Doctor Who was so over-filled it felt like two-dozen of those gurning misanthropes piling out of a tiny little car. Packed to the gills, it was. Stuffed like a haggis. A veritable Berliner of in-your-face fanwankery.

With this as my initial impression of the episode, that, like Wales, it was simply too overpopulated for it's own good, the clouds that lay over my sleep-deprived mind parted to allow a beam of inspiration to alight in my consciousness with a title for my review: "The Swollen Earth". It was perfect. Simple...yet elegant. A clever play on the title of the episode, as well as a biting criticism. I promptly went on "the internets", clicked on "New Post" and proudly started this review under said title and saved a draft version to finish later in the week.

Well, much to my annoyance, within a day a review was posted up by one Iain Hep-burn. Up near the top of the review, it contained this line: "Stolen Earth? Swollen Earth more like."

"Damn you, Iain Hep-burn!" I shouted, shaking my fist in the air. Defeat, snatched from the jaws of victory! Crestfallen, I have since had to settle for a review proclaimed by a title which is a mere shadow of my original idea. You'll just have to make do.

Doctor Who: The Stolen Earth

How does that old adage go? Too many companions spoil the broth? Something like that...and The Stolen Earth is a fine example. The episode is simply sodden with so much exposition and forced emoting that it doesn't leave a lot of room for any of the characters to do much of anything. There certainly isn't room for any individual development. It's all about spectacle; there's surface, but no depth.

Damn you, Iain Hep-burn!

Not that some of that isn't nice. The Mill outdoes itself with eye-candy from all the money they saved by not having
to do anything for the last couple of weeks. They have some great
spectacle of Dalek saucers attacking New
York, the nicely-rendered (if structurally questionable) Shadow
Proclamation outpost, Daleks attacking the Valiant and the Medusa
Cascade.

Part and parcel with the overblownedness (I just made that word up)
of it all are the relentless and gratuitous attempts to tug at our
heartstrings, which often comes across as cackhandedly blunt. A little
finesse would probably improve matters significantly; throughout the
episode we are repeatedly bludgeoned by dialogue that seemed to be applied by a trowel and a score that seemed to be applied by Murray Gold. Even Harper makes some strangely heavy-handed choices in camera zooms when Rose first appears in her flash of lightning.

Probably the height of this problem is the reunion between Rose and the
Doctor. Rose appears in the distance with her big gun and bigger
teeth. The music swells. They run toward each other. Even the
Doctor's extermination happens in slow motion. I can't help but think
the mawkishness of this scene is probably intentional so it could be
subverted by the Dalek attack, but even that is undermined by its predictability.

Poor Martha still seems to be saddled with the most hackneyed parts of the script. Even Dame Judy Dench couldn't deliver contrived pap like "Maybe Indigo tapped into my mind, because I ended up in the one place I wanted to be!" and be convincing. (Her mom doesn't fare much better: "you came home. At the end of the world you came back to me") In fact all of UNIT and the "Project Indigo" storyline suffers from stilted dialogue and delivery and poor plotting. Where's Colonel Mace when we need him? I suppose I should be pleased that at least she gets to bandage someone's head for a change.

Well, at least Freema got a part for a change, and they apparently had to bump someone else to make room for it: it seems to be Sarah Jane's turn to get the "Guest star Freema Agyeman" treatment. All Liz Sladen gets to do is look terrified and/or sad for a few minutes, and then go drive her car into a couple of Daleks. I can only hope they find more for her to do in Journey's End...and less for Gwen and Sylvia.

Another contributing factor to the lack of room for character is that what
seemed like a full third of the episode is devoted to a video
conference call with lots of people introducing themselves to each
other and spouting exposition and flirting like it's one of those "meet
hot singles" toll lines you see advertised on late-night television.
Oh, and Rose gets all jealous and feels left out. The climax of this extended scene erupts into techno music and very, very dramatic typing. I suppose it could be worse: before the split-screen thing everyone was just moping around being despondent.

What little room there is for character moments seems to have been reserved for Rose, Donna and Harriet Jones. Rose returns to form after her thoroughly perplexing turn in last week's episode. Donna's...well, Donna's Donna. That's a good thing. And I rather enjoyed Harriet Jones' hurried, stubborn performance (though her reveal was no surprise to anyone who paid attention to the credits). Wasn't Penelope Wilton magnificent?

Parallel Worlds:

If RTD was looking for a place to trim some of the extra bloat off of The Stolen Planet, let me suggest this: perhaps we could have done without the whole deal with the Shadow Proclamation. You see, deep down, when looked at closely, the Shadow Proclamation turns out to be all a bit shit. After some four series worth of ominous-sounding buildup, all they turn out to be is the space police?? The intergalactic equivalent of CHiPs? So much for the mystery.

...even for cops, the Shadow Proclamation don't turn out to be all that much cop.

Now, my general distaste for jackbooted-thugs of all stripes tends to give me a low opinion of all armed agents of the state, but, even for cops, the Shadow Proclamation don't turn out to be all that much cop. They seem to consist of about half-a-dozen Judoon and a couple of haughty, palid zealots looking for a crusade. They're like the old "homespun" version of UNIT from the 70's or 80's, but with digital technology. Once the Doctor materializes in their hallway and places an order for Ma-Po Tofu, nothing much happens.

On top of the fact that the Shadow Proclamation itself isn't exactly exciting, I think the lengthy interludes where Donna and the Doctor mull over the missing planets and follow bees really throw a spanner in the pacing of the episode. Sure, I realize the narrative function of these delays: the earthbound Planeteers need to fret and whine about how the Doctor's cell-phone battery must have run dry and they're all going to die. Nonetheless, they seem to be twiddling their thumbs while high energy exciting-type stuff happens to everyone else.

The Masters of Earth

I have something to confess: I've always liked the Daleks. Sure, some of the earlier models were easily thwarted by stairs and mirrors and mud on their eyestalks and insulating materials on the floor and people pushing them from behind; and sometimes they have been known to e...nun...ci...ate... all... of... their... di...a...logue... like...this (I'm looking at you, Dr. Who and the Daleks!), but, overall, they've done a great job of filling their role as iconic Doctor Who monsters.

Now, some of you older readers may remember an obscure space opera called Star Trek: The Next Generation that aired back in the late 80's and early 90's. Somewhere in the middle of its short run, the series introduced a wildly popular enemy called The Borg. They were sort of like Margaret Thatcher's worst nightmares about the Soviet Union, or the Legion of Doom with coordinated outfits. They were pretty much an unstoppable, malevolent force with designs on literally consuming the rest of the universe.

No more of this sifting and perverting one human cell in a billion crap. No more pig-slaves. No more religion.

Well, it didn't take long for The Next Generation and its sequels to water down The Borg until they were not only a stoppable force, but one that seemed to have trouble getting started. Unfortunately, the Daleks have often followed a similar path. For decades now Doctor Who has been tainting the Daleks' biology with human DNA, diluting their menace, and making them behave in a thoroughly un-Dalek-like manner.

Well, I'm pleased to note that the Daleks are finally back to being real Daleks. No more of this sifting and perverting one human cell in a billion crap. No more pig-slaves. No more religion. No more breeding with humans. I hope the reveal next episode of whatever the hell they're harvesting the humans for doesn't let me down terribly.

Okay, so they aren't perfect. They're probably a little too talky; they used to be all "Exterminate!" and "You will o-bey the da-leks!", but now they're all "maximum extermination!" and "annihilate UNIT!" and "Daleks do not accept apologies." And they still seem to panic a bit too much whenever the Doctor is mentioned. ("Emergency! Locate the TARDIS! Find the Doctor!")

And what's with the Daleks being so giddy about being masters of Earth? The Supreme Dalek intones, "We have waited long for this ultimate destiny," and they all bob up and down in space chanting "Daleks are the Masters of Earth." So what? As far as galactic backwaters go that's
right up there with "Today: Germany...Tomorrow: Davos, Switzerland!"

Julian Bleach and the production team have done a stellar job of bringing Davros back to life (if that's what it is). Harper handles Davros's slow reveal well, and his exchange with the Doctor, complete with nipple-slip, was likely the best dialogue of the episode (except, perhaps, for the incongruous "bye!")

On my second pass through the episode I'm even slowly growing to appreciate Dalek Caan as he gurgles and sputters and laughs maniacally. The bizzareness of the performance is fascinating in much the same way that Billy Piper's was in Turn Left. The tentacled abomination, in a spotlight, squealing, "Death is coming...Ho ho...I can see it! Everlasting death for the most faithful companion. Hee hee." Certainly not something you're going to see anywhere else.

No Signal:

I know that when some of us go on to point out the scientific inaccuracies and implausibilities in Doctor Who, certain frustrated individuals like to throw around this argument that Doctor Who isn't actually science fiction at all, but it's actually fantasy and, therefore, we should treat it exactly like Harry Potter, and hold it to no standards of plausibility and scientific integrity.

Well, that's bollocks.

Unfortunately, so is much of the science in this episode. When Doctor Who, or any other science-fiction programme, starts pulling bad science out of its arse, that doesn't make it fantasy...that simply makes it bad science fiction.

Do you know what happens when millions of cell phones try to call the same number at the same time? Busy signals.

The worst culprit of "bad science fiction" in The Stolen Earth is the nonsense with the phones. Do you know what happens when millions of cell phones try to call the same number at the same time? Busy signals. And probably crashing a lot of computers. Even if they could all do their calling at the same time, and even if they still had satellites and whatknot to help 'em along, it still wouldn't result in cartoonish smoke-rings pulsing slowly up the giant phallus in Torchwood Plaza. It was even a dramatic catastrophe, with Billie Piper and a bunch of other people staring wishfully into space while hammering away at their cell phones.

A consideration of the science of the episode also brings up the question of why the hell the 27 planets were so close to each other, and, more importantly, why they don't seem to be experiencing any of the massive gravitational effects one would expect from the proximity. ("It was on Earth. This planet called earth...miles away.") I guess that if you take those sort of things into account you'd have to forgo the spectacle of a whole bunch of planets filling up your entire night sky.

Interagency cooperation:

Here are a bunch of random observations I couldn't put anywhere else...

t's a pretty thick coincidence that the three missing planets from the past happened to be on Donna and the Doctor's radar, but none of the other 23.

Why exactly was the cloister bell ringing? When he got to the earth everything seemed fine. Who or what set it off?

"Donna...I'm taking you to the Shadow Proclamation...hold tight!" Why? Is there turbulence?

One of the more unintentionally funny exchanges in the episode:Martha: "I've been promoted. Medical director on Project Indigo."Jack: "Did you get that thing working?"Martha: "Indigo's top secret. No one's supposed to know about it."

Why does Jack just insist "We're dead". Jack, in particular, we know is going to not stay dead.

That comic chemistry at work: "You're saying bees are aliens?" "Don't be daft!...not all of them."

Daleks Attack Formation 7 seems to be a fancy way of saying three Daleks
all facing the same way. Interestingly, that seems to be the same formation they use to exterminate Harriet Jones, Former Prime Minister.

I'm with Frank. I enjoyed the final "We know who you are" joke...

If Jack had shared his info about the teleportation device with UNIT, maybe they'd have had working
teleporters and been able to, you know, combat the Daleks or something. A little inter-agency cooperation goes a long way. And, for that matter, if it was just a matter of figuring out 4 and 9, I'm sure Jack could have tried all 100 combinations in relatively short order.

The Pirate Plot:

Apparently a lot of the...what do you call them? min-g-mon-gs? ...have been up in arms at the possibly-gratuitous references to continuity and such that has been scattered up and down the last couple episodes, and will probably reach a boiling point with Journey's End. I for one wasn't particularly bothered, because the passing references generally seemed appropriate (such as mentions of Tosh and Owen).

Interestingly, however, the episode has a lot more connection to The Pirate Planet than the idle name-dropping of "Calufrax Minor". Just like the Captain's victim planets in the earlier serial, the Doctor notes that the 27 stolen planets are "in perfect balance." All those worlds fit together like pieces of an engine (a very big engine, it would seem). I don't recall what it was actually for in The Pirate Planet, but I wouldn't be surprised if RTD lifted it directly from Adams' earlier script.

Bait and Switch:

And finally, I want to discuss at some length my feelings about the cliffhanger...

June 28, 2008

Ah. The cloister bell. The dull clang of that harbinger of doom inevitably warms my black and shriveled little heart. It may only get a few seconds of screen-time, but as soon as I heard it, I knew bloody well that I wanted to incorporate the word "cloister" into the title of my review.

Well, I'll have you know that coming up with a clever title based on the word "cloister" isn't easy. Especially if you're not exactly sure what a cloister is. One might assume it refers to that which "cloists", but that leaves me in much the same dark. Or perhaps it's a comparative...the opposite of "less cloist". I imagine that somewhere in England there's a city called "Cloister."
Of course, they, no doubt, spell it "Cloicester", or some such.

Regardless of meaning, there's just something about the shape of the word that doesn't lend itself to entertaining wordplay. My options were fairly limited in both agent-noun form ("Cloisters Rockefeller") and conjugated verb form ("Jesus Cloist!") Needless to say, given the end-result, the deciding factor was "which one is most crass?" I suppose that was predictable, on some level.

That's one of the best things about this "blog": Everyone has their
own highly-individual style. No two of us are alike. We're like foul-mouthed, sarcastic snowflakes. Frank's reviews are all "Look at me! I can read!" with their French intellectuals and a clever allusion to "Finnegan's Wake" under ever punctuation mark. Stuart is generally giddy about anything the producers throw at him, and posts within seconds of the episode airing. Damon's are compact diatribes about bus toilets
and the future regenerations of his curries. My reviews are long, rambling, nit-picky things where I bitch about where everything went wrong, even if I liked the episode, and try not to sound as intellectual as Frank. And they're always late.

The point here is something about how we all fall over ourselves to make sure that whatever we write in our reviews, we make sure we're not just saying what's been said before, and if we do, we try to do it in a new and original way. Unfortunately, the current production team on Doctor Who, especially Russell T. Davies, could stand to learn a little from this approach, because there's a lot of times when I feel a bit too much deja vu during certain episodes. Either that or it's food poisoning.

It's too bad this was the Doctor-lite episode, or I might have just dropped the whole "cloister" thing and gone with "Gurn Left."

Doctor Who: Turn Left

Copyleft:

I'm not sure if this found its way over to the side of the pond that you lot are on, but over here during the 80's we had a disturbingly popular sitcom called Family Ties, based on a premise something along the lines of "conservative teenager has lefty hippie parents." Now that the programme has been off the air for twenty years or so, my recollections of the programme are somewhat hazy, but one thing that has managed to burn itself into my unwilling mind is that Family Ties was infamous for its overuse of one of the more unfortunate narrative devices to ever hit the world of television: the clip show.

I imagine some of you are familiar with the concept of the clip show. The producers, rather than coming up with an entire episode of new material, would recycle most of the material from previously-aired episodes, and wrap it all in what is generally an appallingly weak frame-story.

How clever!

Well, I think Turn Left is officially Doctor Who's first clip show.

Admittedly, the frame-story is probably significantly better than the average version, where the family sits around their living room and reminisces about various events that happened over the course of previous episodes. Nonetheless, much of the exercise comes across as an attempt to reuse footage and special effects from myriad (mostly RTD's less-well-scripted) episodes from the last couple of seasons. Even when they didn't actually use recycled clips they feel the need to play the name-dropping game with Sarah Jane and the Torchwoodians and that lot, and then they make extensive re-use of their favourite gimmick, the far-too-ineffective exposition-by-television-news-channel. To bring it all back around, at the end we get flashbacks to clips pulled from this same episode...but, get this...they're backwards! How clever!

Bar sinister:

It can probably be argued that most narratives are only as good as their villain, and Turn Left, at least in the outermost frame story, comes up short here. Chipo Chung's portrayal of the fortune teller is woefully marred by at least a couple of deficiencies.

First, she's so clearly, telegraphically evil that I'm surprised that the makeup department didn't outfit her with a goatee she could stroke malevolently while she salivates at the prospect of Donna turning her car to the right. The end result was sort of the bastard stepchild of Anthony Ainley and Sarah Parish voiced by Frank Oz. Donna should almost certainly have been more suspicious about her
insidious "chan reading is free for red hair tho." Then again, she's a
bit thick in this episode; look at the whole labour camp thing.

I'm not sure which I find more disturbing...Chung's mildly offensive
caricature of Chinese people, or her mildly offensive caricature of
Evil people.

Secondly, her portrayal comes across as some sort of cartoon version of a Chinese person, complete with an atrocious accent. Mind you, this broad ethnic plastering is sort of par-for-the-course in the episode, with Joseph Long's stereotyped Italian ("Mama! Is people! Nice-a people!") and Loraine Velez's evil-eye-giving Spanish Maid similarly difficult to endure.

I'm not sure which I find more disturbing...Chung's mildly offensive caricature of Chinese people, or her mildly offensive caricature of Evil people.

Not all the blame for the fortune-teller fiasco can be laid on Chung, however; Davies' script didn't give her a whole lot to work with. Lines like "Turn right and never meet that man...turn right and change the world!" almost demand to be followed by an evil cackle, though instead we just got the opening
credits, and while I fully expected the fortune teller's last line to be something
along the lines of "And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it
weren't for you meddling kids!", what we got instead ("You were so strong! What
are you? What will you be?? What will you be??") makes me wonder if Davies' owns stock in foreshadowing.

Dung Beetle:

No, I'm not talking about Paul this time.

It's too bad that the Mill blew its entire budget on computer-generated banners and lanterns, and one small mushroom cloud, because it sure would have been nice if the beetle weren't such utter rubbish. I mean, really...why a beetle in the first place? My theory is that they opted for the beetle because they happened to have a big rubber one lying around in the prop department. We get lots of unconvincing scenes of beetle-puppet gnawing at Donna's hair. (Now, I can see the appeal of gnawing on Donna's hair...I'd consider doing it myself...but somehow it would have been more effective if it just sat there attached to her instead of groping her ponytail.)

The beetle scenes weren't helped any by Catherine's least-convincing performances of the episode. Maybe she's just not cut out for abject fear; she's far better at trying to be brave even when she's afraid...or maybe the rest of this season has made the terror out-of-character for her. I was unimpressed by Donna's franticly chasing her own
tail while trying to see the beetle on her back, complete with thundery little sound effects that I can only imagine are supposed to indicate how quickly she's snapping her head around trying to see it. The rest of the special sound also hindered my beetle-appreciation; the clichéd chittering, scuttle-y beetle-sound that played on the soundtrack whenever the beetle was even hinted at got old before it even started.

Port Forwarding:

The entire episode, of course, was carried, if you will, on Donna's
back, like a big, rubbish beetle. While we get a little more of the old
shouty Donna near the beginning of her new life, and as mentioned the
screamy "get this thing off my back!" Donna certainly wasn't the high
point of Tate's Donna Noble career, most of what works about Turn Left works because of her. The ever-increasing hints that she's going to have a spectacular exit-stage-left at the end of the season are getting to me, because, as you're well aware, I think she's the best thing since sliced bread.

I can see the appeal of gnawing on Donna's hair...I'd consider doing it myself...

Nonetheless, ominous omens are afoot, mostly focusing on her specialness. From the "most important woman in the universe" to realities bending around her, we're being set up for some spectacular reveal about Donna...let's hope it's good; they've already brought back "Bad Wolf" for the denouement, and you know what rubbish that is.

Between the flashbacks and the foreshadowing I think I'm getting motion sickness.

Tate's work stands in marked contrast to Billie Piper's strangely affected performance. While Tate's missteps result from her being too into the character, Piper's alien characterization of Rose is strangely fascinating, if not spectacularly convincing. From her bizarrely poor attempts to play nonchalant when she runs into Donna to her inability to tear her eyes away from the thing on her back to her ominous declarations set to spooky music, she spends most of the episode looking like she's off her meds.

Left Behind:

No...I'm not referencing the ridiculous Christian Dispensationalist movies staring Kirk Cameron...this is just the part of the review where I run on about random nitpicky things I can't think to put anywhere else.

Donna tells the fortune-teller "It was on Earth. This planet called earth...miles away." I'd say other planets are definitely something you want to keep "miles away" from your own. If they're any closer than that you're in trouble. And why assume a person from a planet colonized by Chinese people has no awareness of this "Earth."?

I learned from the credits that Donna's friend who kept staring at her back was named Alice Coltrane, no doubt in honour of the late, great jazz musician. Too bad they didn't find a way to use some of Coltrane's music in the episode; it would have been better than the pop music Murray Gold scattered throughout much of the ending.

Between the flashbacks and the foreshadowing I think I'm getting motion sickness.

It finished, of course, with that lengthy fan-serving trailer. I like to think of it as a clip show for next week's episode.

Rose tells Donna that the day she chose to "turn left" was a day she "...wouldn't remeber, it was the most ordinary day in the world." This seems odd, since the entire premise of the episode hinges on the fact that she remembered it.

Where can I get a ridiculously large "Leeds" stamp? This entertained me, for some reason...

When parallel Donna first sees the TARDIS she says "What's a police box?"...what...hasn't she ever seen Doctor Who?

Two Left Feet:

It's getting to be a bit of a tradition for us to generate somewhat
schizophrenic reviews. We, apparently, want to have our cake and eat
it, too (what else does one do with cake?) We either heap our love and
affection on the episode and then mercilessly eviscerate it, or vice versa.
There always seems to be a significant portion of the episode we love
dearly (Hi, Catherine Tate!) and a whole lot of bollocks that rubs us
the wrong way (Hi, plot, dialogue, rubbish science and Freema Agyeman!)

I blame the writers.

No...I don't mean those of us writing the reviews; we're doing the
best with what we have to work with. I mean the writers of Doctor
Who. And maybe the producers. And script editors. Here's the
problem...even a hollow, manipulative, heavy-handed slab of fanwankery
like Turn Left is simply sodden with brilliantly conceived character
moments and It almost makes me think that if RTD were saddled with,
say, a good producer and script editor, he'd have the makings of a good
writer.

There were tons of little things in the episode deserving of
praise. The dropping of Donna in Sutton Court was, I'm pretty certain,
a clever reference to the Doctor's failed attempt to return Sarah Jane
to South Croydon. I also appreciated the observations about the U.K. teetering on the brink
of fascism.

Predictably the Donna/Wilf moments were some of the strongest. Of
particular note is the exchange "You're not gonna make the world any
better by shouting at it!"/"I can try!" and their thoroughly defeated
reaction to seeing the Adipose on television is a wonderful contrast to
their enthusiasm about aliens in the "proper" universe.

C'mon. Do us a favour.

There was effective comedy: Donna's thinking the Titanic crash was a
sequel; "Don't tell me...the hospital's back!"; Rose's recognition of
the meaninglessness of "it seems to be in a state of flux."

Rose's ambiguous lack-of-response to "Were you and him...?" said
more than any answer she could have given. There were, shockingly, a
couple of moments where Jacqueline King's Sylvia almost seemed human.
Effective tear-jerking all around. Even the special sound people have
something to redeem themselves: the nuclear shockwave was a brilliant
touch.

Why can't you people be more consistent? C'mon. Do us a favour. Throw us a bone, here. Those nice people over at Torchwood generally have no qualms about serving us a steaming plate of crap umpteen times a year.

June 21, 2008

There's one big disadvantage to doing an eleventh hour, if you will, review of Midnight. To put it quite simply: most everything has already been said. There's nothing new under the bright, instantly-lethal sun. This means that most of the points I'd most likely have made, someone else (or everyone else) already has, and I'll just end up repeating their observations. While I generally try to litter my posts with my own voice, I'll probably end up stealing those of everyone else. I guess I'll use this as an excuse to do a fairly short review (It could happen!) and maybe I'll manage to avoid echoing each and every point the other reviewers have already made, though I probably will. At least I can be fairly certain of not falling into the trap of parroting French philosophers, since I'm at best vaguely aware of their existence.

Of course, if I really wanted to creep you all out, I'll start repeating all of the other reviewers before they've written their review. I'm still working on that.

Doctor Who: Midnight

Seven passengers set sail that day for an eight hour tour...an eight hour tour:

I have to admit...the beginning of this episode had me worried.

No, not the part before the opening credits, where Donna and the Doctor have their little phone call. That worked for me. I'm even tempted to rattle on at length about how marvelous Donna is, even in an episode she barely appears in...but I should probably restrain myself. My affection notwithstanding, I can save my adulation for the next episode, which, if I'm lucky, will be positively dripping with Catherine Tate.

As they settled in for their package tour, I felt sure the episode was going to be a rehash of Voyage of the Damned, complete with hamfisted satire of some easy target, cackhanded scripting from, to repeat even myself, "the inconsistent hand of Russell T. Davies", broadly-drawn caricatures, a culminating deus ex machina, and probably a liberal use of magic wands and pixie dust. Having never seen Hitchcock's Lifeboat, the beginning of the trip had me fully expecting something more along the lines of a sci-fi version of Gilligan's Island. The whole part where the Eurovision Song contest was layered over early twentieth-century cartoons and an "artistic installation" for a bus containing a total of seven passengers "and variations thereupon" was just annoying, and Murray Gold's intentionally-cheesy mallet-driven lounge score didn't help matters. Title-cards telling us how far the bus has gone, the suburban family, a slide show of the Professor's holiday...little of this held any promise. Even Dee Dee's lost moon, Jethro's foreshadowing and Sky's ex leaving her for another galaxy didn't go far to improve matters.

It's like all this repetition forms some sort of repeated meme.

Of course, the shadow of the Christmas special did fall especially hard over Midnight in the harsh exotonic sunlight. The repetition doesn't just happen diagetically in the episode. The Doctor, sans companion, is on a tour with a bunch of stereotypes when disaster strikes. It even repeated the part where the hostess sacrifices herself to take down the villain, though this time without the loss of an innocent forklift. It's like all this repetition forms some sort of repeated meme. Of course, as someone who watched Doctor Who: Confidential mentioned way down there in one of the earlier reviews, apparently this was intentional. While I'm repeating everything I'll just nick this bit from Stuart's fine review way down there: "it’s the same story, another group of tourists on the brink of death and indeed as he also identified in Confidential
(as usual nicking everything I wanted to write here), he wanted to see
what happened when humanity actually acted realistically in the face of
the Doctor’s platitudes." There. I think that's almost recursive.

Unsurprisingly, I was pleasantly surprised; everything was all uphill
from there. When the bus finally grinds to a halt, the episode finally
starts moving.

In Case of Emergency, Break Glass:

Humans sure seem to be disturbingly flighty, frail creatures. As soon as the bus develops some plot-conveniencing engine trouble, the fear sets in. The panic begins and in a no time at all they begin to turn on each other like a pack of hungry cannibals at a dinner party (with apologies to Raymond Scott). The shrieking might get to be a bit much ("I don't need this. I'm on a schedule! This is completely unnecessary!"), but, as everyone else keeps saying, all this shouting and hair-pulling is how people actually react when faced with minor delays and life threatening circumstances, so it's no surprise that in a few short minutes they're ready to start tossing people out of airlocks.

Of course, the Doctor doesn't do himself any favours, what with trying to cover for the flim-flam and then his general arrogance and insufferable cleverness and "John Smith" and all that. Insert point here that everyone else has made about why the Doctor needs his companions around to protect him from himself.

It's like all this repetition forms some sort of repeated meme.

When the knocking begins it sets off more tension than in Poe's "The Raven" (sorry, it's as close to French philosophy as I'm likely to get...you already got your Gilligan's Island). Once it (whatever it is) gets inside, it doesn't take long to reach a point where the mob mentality takes over. Once the hostess suggests throwing people out of the bus, the adults of Cane family in particular begins to salivate. I'll leave the observations about "this way lies fascism" to Frank, since he already wrote at length on the topic. Midnight owes a substantial debt to a thousand other enclosed-space horror movies, but Davies has managed to craft an effective slice of the genre.

Score One For Murray Gold:

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't reiterate everyone's glowing praise of Murray Gold's score and the "special sound". Rumour has it this is also addressed at length in the aforementioned Confidential. While never quite reaching to the level of questionable excess so many of his past efforts have striven for, Gold's score does a fairly relentless job of ramping up the tension from about the moment everything starts to go pear-shaped. The score and "special sound" combines very well with the mixing and sound design of Sky's vocal acrobatics to really accentuate the feeling of the alien about the whole situation.

Midnight Oil:

What really keeps a mechanism like Midnight running smoothly is the performances, and I rather think the cast acquits itself better-than-average in the episode, even if there are a few needlessly arm-flailing bug-eyed moments and a bit too much of the macho posturing from the thuggish Biff Cane ("Calling me a coward??").

It's like all this repetition forms some sort of repeated meme.

Lesley Sharp turns in a fairly stellar performance as Sky Sylvestry; sure it was a little bog-standard screaming and panicking early on, but I largely blame the script for that; once she's possessed, she's positively alien, even when she stops repeating what everyone's saying. (An especially nice touch from the director is the use of the silhouette to frame her, which highlights the alienness very effectively).

I liked the Professor and Dee Dee...both fine portrayals of well-written characters. I particularly thought Dee Dee rang of potential companion material, though she was, admittedly, no Catherine Tate. Tennant is also quite excellent in Midnight, pulling off "helpless" far better than he's managed anywhere else in the last three years of his, to quote Neil quoting someone else, being all David Tennant-y (I particularly liked his "experimentation" with Sky's voice games), and despite some script-induced caricature problems, Lindsey Coulson evokes a hell of an effective look at garden-variety suburban evil.

Rough in the Diamond/The Dark Side of the Sun:

Of course, this wouldn't be one of my reviews without me finding something about the episode to bitch about, so here I've finally found my own voice.

Okay, so maybe the entire concept of "exotonic sunlight" is all bollocksy nonsense to begin with...but not as bollocksy as the idea that someone would decide to put a resort somewhere where the sunlight vaporizes people. Space is big, or so they tell me. Humans have, apparently, managed to reach other galaxies. Why, of all bizarre ideas, did they decide to put their pleasure palace in one of the few places where the sunlight is lethal. It's like the ultimate adventure holiday. It's almost as ridiculous as the idea that they'd upkit the whole thing and move when the Doctor tells them that something scary lurks in the light.

Also sort of grating on me: A planet with no dark. Made of diamonds. Incredibly bright light at all times. And what did they choose to name it? "Midnight." Calling the planet Midnight seems to be either a too-cleverly ironic name for any of the planet-naming scientisty types, or perhaps a senselessly arbitrary and cynical writing decision on the part of the writer.

Sky even calls on the mob to cast the Doctor out into "the sun...and the dark!" I saw that sunlight. That was no dark sun.

It's like all this repetition forms some sort of repeated meme.

Interestingly, this episode chose to put the Doctor in imminent danger for his life, and I'm all for that...but somewhere in the back of my head I'm having difficulty suspending my disbelief that his life is actually at risk. No, not just because he's the star of "Doctor Who" and for all sorts of inviolate financial and narrative reasons he's obviously not going to die. The big problem I have is that, last I looked, he's already got a future. All of one episode back we learn he's going to spend a great deal of time wooing Professor River Song over a period long enough to fill a thick diary...which was interesting in its own right, but sort of drains a lot of future-Who of dramatic tension. Maybe it's one of those "time's in flux" wibbly-wobbly things. Idunno. Maybe it was all a terrible, regrettable mistake, like some idiot mistaking the Doctor for being "half-human"...or Torchwood.

June 14, 2008

Elves. I've always hated those bastards. I'm not talking about those diminutive little indentured servants slaving away in some sweatshop at the North Pole making toys. I'm talking about those effete creatures from the diseased mind of J.R.R. Tolkein. Hated them in the books. Hated them in the movies.

"Blasphemy!" you say. How, you ask, can I possibly feel such contempt for elves? They're tall and blonde and beautiful and magical! Their skills at, well, pretty much anything are unmatched in all the realms of dwarves and men! When they sing, the birds stop to listen! Criticizing the elves is like criticizing angels from heaven! They're perfect in every way!

"Blasphemy!" you say.

This is exactly why I hate them, the entitled, superior gits in their gated communities. I like to think of them as sort of Upper-Middle Class of Middle Earth, but there's nothing "Middle" about them. Wealthy and powerful and morally pure, beyond reproach in all conceivable ways, they're genuine Übermenschen. They're even immortal, for fuck's sake. They're like the sort of aristocratic Aryan people you'd see picnicking in those fascism-evoking Claritin commercials. It's all so goddamned twee I can still taste it.

And, just for the record, I piss on angels, too.

Doctor Who: Forest of the Dead

As you can tell from my previous oh-so-timely review, The Shadow-Nose, which I don't believe anyone read besides the late James P. Coleman, former Governor of Mississippi, and famed Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer, I had rather high hopes for Forest of the Dead. Stephen Moffat was scripting it! The first half was a spectacular exercise in building tension. The characters were wonderful! The cliffhanger left so many tantalizing questions unanswered. It was scary as all git-out! What could possibly go wrong?

Well, I hate to say it, but, speaking of blasphemy, I found the episode to be a bit of a crushing disappointment after Silence In The Library. Oh, it's not to say there weren't a number of nice things I could say about Forest of the Dead, but from the miserable resolution of last week's cliffhanger to the use of a literal deus ex machina in the unnecessary extra ending, the episode couldn't hold a candle to its thrilling predecessor.

Can't See The Forest for the Trees

It's not so much that I can't see the forest for the trees. I recognize that Forest of the Dead was veritably pockmarked with witty dialogue, fine performances and clever conceits. The Mill turned in some stunning work, and Euros Lyn's direction was excellent, as always. I nominate Alex Kingston for Guest Star of the Month.

However, every time I try to look at the whole forest, I end up walking into a tree. The branch that stuck me in the eye hardest was the happy ending, which more or less ruined everything for me. Neil has already run on at length about many of the annoying things about the whole bringing-river-back-from-the-dead cop-out, so I'll let you go read his review for much of that. My problems with the ending, however, go far beyond the basic concept of bringing River back. I was also annoyed by the way her resurrection was executed, most notably: the pretentious disembodied narration was enough to make my skin crawl audibly. It was gravely intoned nonsense like "Now and then, every once in a very long while, every
day in a million days when the wind stands fair and the doctor comes
to call...everybody lives!" that had me thinking of a haughty Cate Blanchett droning on about the history of the One True Ring, the whole unbearable thing culminating in River and her four cohorts ending up in that Claritin commercial I mentioned earlier, and the until-this-point interesting character of River settles into a never-ending domestic nightmare.

Vashta Nada

If there was one true shining light, if you will, of Silence in the Library, the one blindingly bright glowing beacon of brilliance, it was this: the Vashta Nerada. As an airborne flesh-melting plague, they served their purpose spectacularly in terms of creating an unflinching atmosphere of dread.

No longer much of a credible threat, they spend much of the
episode trying ineffectively to gum everyone to death.

"Piranhas of the air" they may be, but in Forest of the Dead
Moffat has held them all down and pried out their teeth with a pair of
pliers. No longer much of a credible threat, they spend much of the
episode trying ineffectively to gum everyone to death. From the
moment they stop being a mindless swarm and start treating Proper Dave like a Furby, their menace diminishes exponentially.

I'm also tired of the schtick where all the Doctor has to do is say
"Hi! I'm the Doctor!" and all of his enemies cower in fear. Just one
little rant about "you're in the biggest library in
the universe...look me up!" (Can they even do that? How are they going
to open the books? Can they read? Can they even see? ) and all
trillion-plus Vashta Nerada decide it's time for a holiday.
Trustworthy little biters, too, as they don't bother to take a nibble
even when the Doctor is unconscious or handcuffed to a wall in the
basement. It's the same annoying phenomenon as the alien of the week
invariably deciding to postpone his execution whenever he reveals that
he knows they're called "Sontaran" or something. Rose even did it with
Daleks in Doomsday. It's like a fucking "get out of jail free" card

Breeding Discontent

Despite the usual tour de force performance from Catherine Tate, there are a number of things about her imprisonment in the computer that don't quite work for me. For one thing, I'm tired of the writers of Doctor Who saddling what is supposedly a family drama with their heterosexual agenda. Think of the children! Actually, I'm trying not to think of the children. From the moment she's wheeled into Doctor Moon's sanitarium Donna is apparently intended to be part of some sort of captive breeding program. Perhaps it's because her sudden retreat into domestic bliss and playparks sounds like my idea of Hell, but the entire virtual reality sequence failed to capture my imagination. Her whirlwind romance with Lee is unconvincing, and when Lee and Donna are melodramatically torn apart as CAL has her breakdown, Donna vows to find him. I rather hope that we never see Lee again after their near-miss on the teleport pad, but I fear this is more of that foreshadowing I've heard so much about. Donna is supposed to travel with the Doctor forever, not run off with some bloke she's managed to fall head-over-heels for in a matter of minutes.

For one thing, I'm tired of the writers of Doctor Who saddling what is
supposedly a family drama with their heterosexual agenda. Think of the
children!

Fortunately the Cubist version of Miss Evangelista happens by to do Donna a favor by ruining her sense of domestic bliss. She looks a couple of orders of magnitude more realistic then the inflatable sex-doll she was in Silence In the Library. While I was rather nonplussed with the comically shallow and ignorant Miss Evangelista in first part of the story, the explanation offered for why Miss Evangelista Mark II happens to be the Chosen One smells suspiciously of bullshit: "I think my face has been the bigger advantage. I have the two
qualities you require to see absolute truth: I am brilliant and
unloved." Well, I'll be...she was stupid because she was beautiful!

CAL unfortunately leaves dozens of other unanswered questions left hanging about. I know it seems exciting in Tron, but why does CAL even feel the need to create a virtual suburbia for her wards? Are the files on my computer mating with each other? Why doesn't CAL know anything about what she's supposed to be doing as the computer? Why can she turn her dad off with a meta-remote? More importantly, why can she do it to Doctor Moon? Why is Doctor Moon a moon anyway? Why does the computer think it's a good idea for them to jump around from place to place "like in a dream"? Do dreams even do this? How can people interact if they get jumped into the future every time they think "proctologist appointment"? Why is the virtual world a model of a 20th Century UK suburb if 4022 of the 4023 inmates are space travelers from the far future? Why exactly does a library have a self-destruct feature anyways? Moffat's many plot layers are carefully and cleverly organized, but unfortunately on close inspection it doesn't hold together as well as I'd like it to.

Collected Volumes

Murray Gold. You did so well last week. We even all said nice things.

How could you do this to us in return?

Okay, maybe I can give you some nice credit of having the incidental music on the Telly change whenver CAL switched channels, and to have that incidental music different from what we're hearing at home...but then again, I'm not even sure if this was your doing. Unfortunately much of the rest of your score is either bludgeoningly cackhanded or just plain insufferable. The worst culprit in this second category is the horribly twee music that plays when Donna is rolled out of the ambulance. Variations on this cringeworthy theme is repeated a number of times during Donna's "integration" and her quickie with Lee. In the final scenes, however, your heavy-handed score obliterates everything in its path; it reaches particular lows whenever that little bit of willowy vocals creeps in.

What I wouldn't give for a little Silence in the Library.

Epilogue

Despite my misgivings, there are still a number of positive items shelved in Forest of the Dead and maybe some of those items would have buoyed the episode higher if the first part wasn't so bloody spectacular. It was generally awash with brilliant dialogue; I particularly enjoyed Tennant in Scenery-Chewing Mode discussing hair-dryers and whether screwdrivers work in the dark with Other Dave. There were also great character moments (the Doctor and Donna discussing being "alright" is very much a highlight.) Tinting Anita's visor was a clever plot trick so we wouldn't know precisely when she got it (though I can't help but wonder if her woodenness was intended for this purpose as well.) The running gag about "spoilers" was fun. The kids questioning their own existence was a nice touch too.

I suppose it's some sort of testament to how good a writer that
Moffat actually is that he managed to pull of as good an episode as he
did, despite so much of it being utter bollocks.

June 07, 2008

Gah. This coming home from work exhaustedly at four in the morning and then stupidly deciding to get a couple hours of sleep before I finish my review thing isn't working. I keep, you know, sleeping. The tornado-klaxons are probably warning me that I probably shouldn't be on my computer for reasons of inclement weather, but I have to hurry if I want to get this review finished before Stuart posts his review of the next episode (and I have to go back to work this evening anyway). Unfortunately it'll still probably be late enough to annoy that one guy who was annoyed last week. One of these weeks my schedule will quiet down and I'll be able to finish it during one of my theoretical "days off" in the midweek.

Doctor Who: Silence in the Library

From the moment in the pre-Eurovision trailer when the Doctor intones "Almost every species has an irrational fear of the dark...but they're
wrong. It's not irrational." (a "shadow proclamation", if you will...), I was hooked. I have to hand it to Moffat
(again)...the Vashta Nerada were sort of brilliant, especially the idea
that they're already everywhere, including the earth, flitting about
merrily in our sunbeams. The demonstration with the box-lunch made me particularly happy. The whole concept of the deadly flesh-melting plague lurking in the darkness creates an ominous sense of dread far more effectively than the Daleks have since at least "Dalek" and than the Cybermen probably ever have. The "Not every shadow...but any shadow!" ought to have the children spooked for months to come.

I can only assume it was a century-long orgy
of
cannibalism.

Not that there aren't plenty of unanswered questions that crop up: What did they eat in the
intervening 100 years since the Library's been empty? I'm guessing they
haven't gone vegetarian. I can only assume it was a century-long orgy
of
cannibalism.

They seem to have some level of intelligence, for a swarm of wee
piranhas. If they've had a hundred years to turn the lights off...why
did they leave them on? And, for that matter, why, prey tell, do they
turn them off in order, starting with those farthest from the Doctor and Donna? Is it just for
dramatic effect? Or do they just want to be sporting?

If light slows them down so much, why can they eat someone if they form an extra "shadow"? What are the mechanics of this?

Okay, so as a species there are a few not-perfect,
unexplainey things about them, but that's okay with me. As a threat, they're bloody excellent. And, for all their theoretical implausibilities, at least they aren't carrying their brains around in their bloody hand.

Who's Afraid of the Dark?

Once again, Moffat has decided that the loyal viewers deserve to have the living shit scared out of them, and for the most part The Silence in the Library is bang on. A number of elements work in concert to help create the appropriate state-of-mind, from the leisurely tension-building pace to the claustrophobic
atmosphere (in a planet-sized library!)

Aside from the thoroughly effective wee beasties, a lot of what makes The Silence In the Library work is the setting.
I'm not talking so much about concept of a planet-sized library
(which I also think is brilliant) or The Mill's flashy spectacle of
design (which is spectacular), but about the rooms in the
library. There's just something about the musty old rooms, the vast
shadow-filled spaces, the sunbeams, the tall narrow stacks of books...maybe there's just something naturally creepy about libraries, but the location shooting on the episode is one of the best things about a mostly-excellent whole.

If I hadn't already been hooked by that line from the trailer and the words "Stephen" and "Moffat" being attached to The Silence In The Library,
I would have been by the pre-credits sequence. Yet another one of the brilliant
things about the episode is the parallel between the scenes set in the
library and those with The Girl. The danger faced by the people in the Library stands in stark contrast to the seeming domestic bliss of Eve Newton and her crayons watching cartoons. While The Girl is screaming in sonic-screwdriver-induced pain (I know what that's like), the Doctor and Donna have a pleasant little conversation about her "nice door skills." Newton even delivers a quite respectable performance...and exceedingly rare and wondrous thing in a world that produced Problem Child 2.

The "ghosting" is one of the more dramatically-effective tech-support problems I've ever seen, both when we first encounter it and at the end as Proper Dave stalks the rest of the party. It's just as horrible as Donna says it is.

Even Tennant's more-fearful-than-usual performance keeps things where they should be. Imagine if he were gurning about the entire episode with a big grin on his face. Not chilling at all. Well, at least not in the same way. Lines like "If you understand me look very, very scared.", while quite funny, he even manages to carry off with considerably disturbing aplomb. This is certainly one of Tennant's best performances, and much better than the over-emoted drivel we got at the end of The Doctor's Daughter, and a less pummeling score by Murray Gold certainly doesn't hurt matters.

Dimmer Switch

Not quite everything about Silence in the Library comes together like a clockwork android in its inexhorable march toward scaring the bejeebus out of us. The most significant stumbling block: the slack-jawed Miss Evangelista. I probably can't blame Talulah Riley for the problems with Stackman Lux's "personal everything", as the role was far more caricature than character. The idea that she is literally so stupid she can't tell the
bathroom from the escape pod (twice!) is just absurd, and hearkens back
to the sort of broadly low comic portrayal ("Can't find germany on a map!") that loused up The Runaway Bride. Her stupidity is compounded by shallowness "They think I'm stupid because I'm pretty!" Did she really just say that? At least her stay was brief; I for one was relieved when she wandered vacantly off to her doom.

Absurdity is a fine thing sometimes. Honest. I'm a big fan of absurdity. Unfortunately, the absurdity of Miss Evangelista (and of the scene where the team is being attacked by flying books accompanied by music that seems like something out of a wackier moment in some Harry Potter movie) was somewhat incongruous
with the atmosphere that every single item in the remainder of the
episode was working to create. Think of the amount of actual
dread/horror/fear you felt watching, say, any episode of Red Dwarf, or reading books
by Douglas Adams. Were you genuinely scared when Agrajag cornered Arthur Dent in that-place-where-Agrajag-cornered-Arthur-Dent? (It's been a long time...I think they were in a mountain or something.) I wasn't. Absurdity is the sort of thing that may also affect our
ability to take anything in those abominable Star Wars prequels with any shred of
seriousness...though that's probably actually more attributable to preposterousness. Artists who can manage to combine absurdity with actual chills are few and far between (Hello, Jan Svankmajer!)

That isn't to say there isn't room for levity in an episode such as this. The bit where Donna and the Doctor shred the bullshit intellectual-property contract without missing a beat was handled brilliantly, though I have to wonder how the Beeb feels about that. The Other Dave vs. Proper Dave thing. Time travelers pointing and laughing at archaeologists. Donna's bypassing of the Sonic Screwdriver to get through wooden doors. All quite clever. It's just a problem when something is so ridiculous that it taxes my ability to suspend my disbelief (like, say, nearly everything in The Last of the Time Lords) that it gets in the way of the mood, and in an episode like Silence In The Library, the mood is everything.

Nobody Node The Troubles I've Seen

If there's one other element of the story that didn't agree with me, it's those goddamned "courtesy nodes". You have to wonder what sort of future design specialist would decide to model their information terminals after some sort of safety silverware for the handicapped. Come to think of it, you also have to wonder what sort of production designer on a 2008 BBC science fiction programme would think that's a good idea. While I can't wait for my local public library to obtain "extensive flesh banks", I have difficulty thinking that even Russell-T.-Davies years into the future most library patrons wouldn't be creeped out by a real dead-person's face spouting "the restrooms are on your left" in a flat monotone.

...if you don't mind shutting up for a a bit, I've got a shuffling space zombie after me, and its repeated meme is decidedly more threatening.

As if the concept of a fleshy human face on some sort of ergonomic, space-age feminine hygiene product isn't enough of a questionably annoying design choice, the courtesy nodes are apparently also designed to be verbally annoying. Sure, the decency filters editing the messages of abject fear for tone and content was kind of enjoyable, but do they have to repeat everything ad bloody nauseum? "Donna Noble has left the Library. Donna Noble has been saved. Donna Noble has left the Library. Donna Noble has been saved. Donna Noble has left the Library. Donna Noble has been saved." Yes, yes...got it already! Now if you don't mind shutting up for a bit, I've a shuffling space zombie after me, and its repeated meme is decidedly more threatening.

Fore-Shadowing

For once I have to forgo my usual four or so paragraphs about how
amazingly brilliant Catherine Tate's performance was as Donna. This
isn't because she wasn't wonderful (she was), but because she was sort of sidelined through most of the episode, at least in part by a similarly brilliant Alex Kingston. I'm worried that this will be compounded in the next episode, since once Donna was digitized all we get is her face on a kiosk chanting a mantra. I can only assume that she's currently battling the sinister Master Control Program in a series of crudely animated live-action video games.

Unfortunately, we also get another bit of vague, ominous foreshadowing that seems to indicate an imminent bad end for my favourite Doctor Who character. This would be a bad thing, as Donna Noble should "travel with that man forever." I'm hoping this is all just an elaborate red herring (and no, I don't mean one of the Hath). I'm tired of the revolving door.

Heather Has Two Shadows

Probably the peak of the tension comes, appropriately, as we approach the cliffhanger, with Proper Dave suffering from a particularly bad case of consumption. Proper Dave's fate is particularly well executed, with the "who turned off the lights", the reveal of Dave in blackface (I wonder if Other Dave found this offensive?), and the chilling "I'm fine. I'm
okay. I'm...I'm fine.", and then Zombie Dave is off after the rest of them with some fine shuffling action. The following bit with the running (love the running!) is the one part of the episode where I think the pacing is a bit off; everyone seems like they're shuffling. I'm sure real spacesuits aren't exactly designed for running in, but this is one of the points in the episode where perhaps the leisurely pace should have been dispensed with.

...Properly Digested Dave...

I can't help but think the cliffhanger may have worked better just after Properly Digested Dave starts after them, or perhaps when Colin Salmon tells Eve Newton that the real world is a lie and "Only you can save them. Only you." The actual version seems a little drawn out as they crowbar the "saving of Donna" section into it. Nonetheless, it sets up a whole raft of tantalizing ambiguities that I'm hoping Forest of the Dead manages to deliver on: What's the deal with Professor Song? What's the deal with The Girl? What about that dead guy? How will Donna get out of the extensive flesh bank? Why haven't the V.N. eaten the extensive flesh bank already? They made me wait agonizingly all week for this...it better be as good as the first part.

May 31, 2008

Whodunit? Gareth Roberts. In the BBC Wales main office. With, I can only imagine,
an 1895 Wellington Model 1 Thrust-action vintage typewriter.

Doctor Who: The Unicorn and the Wasp

Message In A Bottle

The similarities between The Unicorn and the Wasp and Gareth Roberts' earlier script The Shakespeare Code are glaring. Each is an historical featuring an famous literary personage, witty dialogue, myriad clever literary and historical references, gratuitous homosexuality, and a dreadful magical conclusion.

...like the ropey remains of one of Damon's curries

Obviously, the biggest fault with the episode lies in the ending (or endings, if you prefer), so I'm going to start this review by turning to the last page and figuring out whodunit. For much of the last act it seems like Roberts was just pulling stuff out of his arse like the ropey remains of one of Damon's curries. The Reverend's anger "broke the genetic lock"?? He "realized [his] inheritance...after all these years."? While this may not have quite matched the stomach-cramping abomination of Freema Agyeman spouting "Expeliarmus!" in last year's Roberts episode, it's still the sort of rubbishy bullshit-science that makes us science-fiction fans froth at the mouth. Roberts' most grievous crime is the contrivance that the "Vespiform telepathic recorder" absorbed "the works
of Agatha Christie directly from Lady Eddison", forcing the clergyman to engage in a complex ritual of serial homicide. Perhaps they should have skipped to the end of the book she was reading and saved some time in solving the mystery. Turns out that when she was in India a giant wasp dragged her back to its lair and laid its eggs inside her; after returning to England the larvae ate their way out of her and joined the C of E.

As the ending continues, the vicar turns into a wasp in a cloud of smoke. A cloud of fucking smoke? You've got to be kidding me. Manimal had better transformation scenes. After what turned out to be a pretty nice collection of giant-wasp footage (I was particularly impressed with the little details like the reverend's stinger nicking the paint off the ceiling), the least the Mill could have done is upset the Mary Whitehouses in the audience with a suitably gruesome homage to Cronenberg's version of The Fly.

Then, just when we think the painful ordeal is finally over, Fenella Woolgar doubles over, struck in the abdomen by
Murray Gold's pummeling score.

In a miserable attempt to maintain some level of drama during an amiable car chase that would have been more thrillingly played out with hurtling rickshaws, we get the news that, once again, "Time is in flux, Donna!" This fails to disuade us of the sickening realization that the tail end of the episode will continue to stagger sousedly into the inevitable, predictable conclusion. Then, just when we think the painful ordeal is finally over, Fenella Woolgar doubles over, struck in the abdomen by
Murray Gold's pummeling score. This has the convenient side effect of wiping her mind of the untenable explanation for the plot, and the Doctor and Donna leave her wandering confusedly in Harrogate like a returned abductee on The X-Files or a Liverpudlian football fan after the big match.

The final indignity in the episode is the maudlin bit at the end in the TARDIS. Roberts borrows from RTD's Book of Very Large Numbers and David Tennant digs out his only not-dog-eared copy of an Agatha Christie book which not only has a giant wasp on the cover, but was published in the year five million. Exactly five million. We're not talking about some "5,012,315 A.D." shit here. Round numbers only. It's all about the zeros.

You may be surprised to learn that despite the final ten minutes of unmitigated bollocks, I actually enjoyed The Unicorn and the Wasp. Thoroughly. I had a gay old time. The final act of The Doctor's Daughter similarly ended in a staggering array of implausible crap, and I slagged it mercilessly in my review. So why should this episode be different? Why do I hold it to a different standard? Simple: The Unicorn and the Wasp was taking the piss. The whole thing plays out like a send up of a genre so well-crafted that even I, who have never read an Agatha Christie book, can appreciate its machinations.

Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic

As usual, I spent most of the episode in glassy-eyed adoration of Catherine Tate. While there is some merit to the observations others have made that she was still settling into the character when this episode was filmed, I'm still pretty certain she's the finest thing about the last three or so decades of Doctor Who. Some people have been all abuzz (like an angry Christopher Benjamin) about whether or not Tennant is going to hang around for series five in 2010...I'm much more worried that Tate won't be around for several more years of the program. I'd hate to lose her after just a season. "Please, mom...can we keep her?" What happened to the good old days when you couldn't get rid of these people?

It's just that sort of resourcefulness and spunk that allows the best
of the program's companions to transcend the wide-eyed
damsel-in-distress quagmire that so often afflicted Adric and Mel.

Speaking of the good old days, I remember when the role of the Doctor's companion was to get into some sort of poorly-calculated dangerous situation and scream, allowing the Doctor to show up in the nick of time and save them. How much cooler is it now that Donna is able to take things like bloody humongous wasps in stride, and deal with them herself? No standing petrified like a deer in headlamps and shrieking for help...she defeats the rutting massive insect with a magnifying glass! Twice! It's just that sort of resourcefulness and spunk that allows the best of the program's companions to transcend the wide-eyed damsel-in-distress quagmire that so often afflicted Adric and Mel.

Over the previous several episodes Tate has been so busy impressing us with her formidable dramatic range that I almost forgot that she was a comedian. Well, The Unicorn and The Wasp's wit-laden script was a fine showcase for her comedic talents. From the brilliant "Oh, what noise! Alright, busy bee...I'll let you out. Hold on. I shall find you with my amazing powers of
detection!" to Donna's totally affected laugh at Agatha's quip about Belgians to her indignant "I'll pluck you in a minute. Why don't we find the real police?", Tate's timing and delivery was pitch-perfect. Only that "What ho! Spiffing!" stab at the RP took me aback.

Synchronicity

Much of the episode, at least before the mawkish denouement, was
littered with witty dialogue and rounded out by generally fine
performances and
sparkling chemistry between David Tennant and the rest of the cast. Fenella Woolgar stands out for her spot-on portrayal of Christie, but props should probably go out to the entire ensemble cast orbiting the magnificent Felicity Kendal (a couple of times).

The true comedic masterpiece in the episode was the poisoning scene. Everything about this made me happy. Graeme Harper's reeling camerawork was ideal for setting the mood, and even Murray Gold's pounding music worked with the scene rather than against it. Tennant and Tate's performances were inspired, and all the elements fit together like well-oiled machinery...Tennant pouring the ginger beer on his head and stuffing his face with walnuts, the game of charades ("Harvey Wallbanger?? How is
Harvey Wallbanger one word?"), "I need something salty!" "How about this?" "What is it?" "Salt!"
"That's too salty!", and Donna's "Alright then...big shock...coming up." If I were the sqeeing type, I'd have squeed.

Another highlight of this was the uproariously funny bit where under cross-examination everyone has flashbacks to things they're too embarrassed to mention or can't use to establish an alibi, followed by the Doctor's own flashback about Charlemagne being stolen by am insane computer in Belgium (The Doctor in the flashback is played by David Tennant, so this would seem to imply that this is one of the Tenth Doctor's untelevised adventures).

Roger's avowed affection for thrashing young boys.

There was really no shortage of other brilliant little things in The Unicorn and the Wasp that deserve mention. Graeme
Harper's inspired first reveal of the giant wasp through Donna's
magnifying glass. Cornering the wasp in the hallway with all of the
other suspects. Allusions to Edward Lear. The subversion of the Agatha Christie formula when it turns out the Colonel can walk. The crack about planet Zog. Roger's avowed affection for thrashing young boys.

Don't Stand So Close To Me

If there's one more area where I wish Roberts had been able to restrain himself, it was with the whole need to explain away the murder mystery in the first place. There was a nice parallel set up between Christie and the Doctor when they first figure out the murder's an alien ("Yeah, but think about it. There's a murder, a mystery and Agatha Christie....no, but, isn't that a bit weird? Agatha Christie didn't walk around surrounded by murders...not really. I mean, that's like meeting Charles Dickens and he's surrounded by ghosts...at Christmas.") I rather liked the image of murders following Agatha Christie around everywhere she goes just as everywhere the Doctor goes the murderers are aliens. It would have been nice if they'd just stopped there. Instead, everyone makes the same "it's just like an Agatha Christie book" observation throughout the rest of the episode, culminating in the ridiculously contrived explanation for the Vespiform's behaviour.

I can't help but think we should be grateful that Clemency was reading a
Christie novel last Thursday. Imagine how different the episode would
have turned out if she were watching Torchwood.

May 17, 2008

I was rather enjoying The Doctor's Daughter. Honest. For about half-an-hour.

It wasn't perfect, of course. Even early in the episode there were myriad things I could pick away at like itchy scabs. Cackhanded exposition ("Instant mental download of all strategic and military protocols!"). "Creature effects" of a quality befitting athletic mascots. A plot that consisted largely of running down corridors.
A prison guard falling for a ploy so stupid even a prison guard wouldn't fall for it. A hall full of arbitrary lasers. Programmed supersoldiers who couldn't hold their own in a brawl with the cast of West Side Story. Even the otherwise magnificent Catherine Tate gets to bellowing about collateral damage and G.I. Jane.

The worst thing about the episode, however, was pretty much any part of it that involved Freema Agyeman. Now, I realize that Martha actually appeared several times in the first half hour of the program. If, however, we can somehow harness that "power of imagination" that school librarians have been telling us about for decades, we can pretend that the parts of the episode
with Martha in them didn't happen. If we can maintain this "suspension-of-belief", just for the first half-hour or so, The Doctor's Daughter is crackin' good entertainment.

Georgia Moffet turns in a disturbingly endearing performace as the titular (no pun intended) character of Jenny. Not only is she physically quite riveting, but she also oozes an infectious charisma from the moment she steps out of the icebox. She manages to infuse the role with both some adult gravitas and a childlike curiosity and naiveté, especially in her later father-daughter scenes with David Tennant. (This is probably the part of the review where I'm supposed to compare and contrast Moffet's character with other young blonde undead-fighting heroines strewn across our cultural landscape. However, as I've never actually felt the need to watch an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I'll have to give it a pass.)

I think I'm in love.

Through much of the episode Catherine Tate was simply stellar. No, really...I think I'm in love. Tate effortlessly balances the serious issues with the lighter material ("Oh, come off it. You're the most anomalous bloke I've ever met.") While the previous companions' relationship with the Doctor was one of slack-jawed adulation, Donna tempers her respect for him by accepting him as an equal, and continues to grow further from her lackluster origins in The Runaway Bride. She once again shows herself to be a very capable and valuable member of the team. ("Always thinking! Who are you people?")

Tate and Moffet's performances and some fine dialogue by Stephen Greenhorn even give David Tennant a chance to shine. While I thought the Doctor's petulant "you're not one of us!" reaction to Jenny in the early parts of the episode was a bit out-of-character, and his reversal on the matter somewhat sudden, by the end of the episode (well, by the end of the good part of the episode), the two have managed to generate some genuine chemistry, with a high point being Jenny's enthusiastic "Time to run again. Love the running!" (The whole
running gag, incidentally, is one of the best, well, running gags
they've given us in the last four years.)

The episode is also resplendent with wonderful Doctor-Donna moments. Probably Tennant's best moment is his conversation with Donna about having been a father before. He demonstrates some serious emotional gravity without the melancholy tripe we get in the episode's final minutes.

I thought the big plot twist, when Donna realizes that the war has only been going on for a week, was near genius, although it is somewhat let down by clumsy execution. While poor Nigel Terry does his best to portray the cliché of the grizzled war veteran (and succeeds somewhat admirably during the earlier expositiony moments), I think perhaps "I've been waiting my whole life for this moment!" was a bit much for someone whose entire life had lasted less than a week.

...an unsurprising harbinger of crap.

A little before the 34 minute mark, however, the Doctor and Donna and
Jenny are reunited with Martha (as well as some of Murray Gold's more bludgeoning work, which seems to follow her around like a lost puppy). This is, given Freema Agyeman's recent
record, an unsurprising harbinger of crap.

It's not unheard of for an otherwise enjoyable episode of Doctor Who to be spoiled by a crap ending (I'm looking at you, Love and Monsters!) What sets The Doctor's Daughter apart, however, is the sheer volume of crap endings they manage to cram into the last eight or so minutes of the program. It's like an expedited version of the last hour of The Return of the King. Greenhorn and Davies (and Moffat!?) layer miserable scenes on the end of the episode one after another, like mattresses protecting some goddamned princess from a pea. (Princesses are all delicate and shit, you know.)

The Sauce turns out to be a magical glowing ball that contains vapors that instantly turn any planet into Star Trek's Raisa. It's operated by shouting and throwing it on the ground, at which point a cloud of Harry Potter glowy stuff floats into the air. Side effects include unrealistic disarmament, free love and frustration of grizzled old veterans who really wanted more war. (If it only takes the Sauce a couple of hours to transmute Messaline from Mordor into a sunny paradise and it can remove several meters of topsoil in the process...what exactly was the point of building your entire city underground? Why didn't someone just start the terraforming when they landed, before they went all Sharks and Jets? And why was it only accessible the whole time through secret tunnels protected by death rays?)

Jenny inevitably sacrifices herself to save the Doctor from the inevitable bullet fired by Cobb. The Doctor inevitably demonstrates his deep and sudden emotional attachment to Jenny (though not enough attachment to hang around a couple of hours after she died). Then Weepy David Tennant undergoes a rapid metamorphosis into Angry David Tennant (there's some rubbish with a gun and poundy music and asthma) and finally emerges from his chrysalis as our beloved Shouty David Tennant, screaming a speech about A Man Who Wouldn't.

An endless rubbish paradox.

Why were they there in the first place? Paradox. An endless Paradox. An endless rubbish paradox. Speaking of endless, there's still another couple of endings before the trailer for the far more promising The Unicorn and the Wasp.

Of course, all of what little emotional pulp you could extract from the Doctor's hackneyed reaction to Jenny's death is promptly pissed on by the final scene where she magically comes back to life, which may be the only thing more inevitable than her death.

Wedged in just before Easter Sunday is the epilogue, wherein Martha gets dropped off at home, which no one really needed to see. Martha is saddled with more terrible lines, such as the sullenly condescending "I can't do this anymore. You'll be the same one day." No moment in the episode hammers home the contrast between the two characters like Donna's brilliantly delivered refutation ("Not me. Never. How could I go back to normal life after seeing all this? I'm gonna travel with that man forever!") I fear this may be some ironic sort of foreshadowing, which would be unfortunate because one series is far too short a time to have Donna as the Doctor's companion. And, just when you think it's safe to go back in the water, this pretentious drivel drops leadenly out of Agyeman's mouth: "All those things you've been ready to die for...I thought for a moment there you'd finally found something worth living for." Then they say their goodbyes and the music swells oppressively.

Nowhere is her role as dead weight better exemplified than her slide
down the hill into a puddle she can't seem to lift herself out of.

Which, finally, brings us back 'round to Martha's role in the episode. Almost all of Martha's lines are poorly delivered oratory, backed by a full orchestra. Her abduction by aliens at the beginning of The Doctor's Daughter seemed a promising development. If it was necessary to remove Martha from the episode for narrative reasons, couldn't they at least have, you know, removed Martha from the episode? Nowhere is her role as dead weight better exemplified than her slide down the hill into a puddle she can't seem to lift herself out of. Agyeman and Greenhorn come together in a perfect storm of shoddy acting and miserable script ("Help me! I'm sinking! I'm sinking! Help me Peck! Help me! Squeal! Gurgle! Squeal!") The more I think about it the more convinced I am that Greenhorn had the entire Martha/Hath subplot thrust upon him and was forced to include her as an afterthought.

And anyone who's been whinging on about Donna having a weekly cry should be counting their lucky stars that it hasn't been Martha shedding tears every week. Her unconvincing bawling after her fish friend drowns is downright painful.

May 10, 2008

The shadow of The Two Doctors is all over this one, but in a good way. Sontarans, Quislings, impugning the honour of Sontaran Generals and Group Marshalls, a think tank of geniuses holed up in a well-defended space-station and/or vocational school, poison gas traps...the parallels are stunning. Sadly, The Poison Sky doesn't have the overt homoeroticism of the earlier story ("Come here, Jamie...look at that." "Look at the size of that thing, Doctor!" "Yes, Jamie...it is a big one."), but at least the Sontarans this time around aren't played by sock puppets. By the end I found myself thoroughly enjoying most of the ride, despite more than a few painful moments.

Unfortunately, after it was all over, I had a few minutes to think about the plot, and try as I may I just can't ignore the more glaring errors in logic and plausibility...

...but you know what they say about hindsight: it makes an ass out of u and me. No wait...that doesn't sound right.

Why do turds suddenly appear...?

Oddly enough, I'm not particularly bothered by a number of the
things that have all the rest of the fans up in arms. Sure, the
Sontaran stratagem itself is pretty ridiculous, but inappropriately
convoluted plans which don't hold up to scrutiny are par-for-the-course
in this sort of thing, and I can forgive it, if only for nostalgic
reasons. I'm similarly nonplussed about the lack of roast pigeons and
burning buildings in the wake of the the Doctor lighting the atmosphere
on fire, as there have been some at-least-reasonably-plausible ideas
floated around to explain away at least portions of this.

Martha's magic nuclear-weapon-halting iPhone, however, is just
beyond the pale. Sure film and television have never been anything but
disastrous in their attempts to portray actual computer use, but that
still doesn't justify why full control of the collected nuclear
arsenals of the assorted nations of the earth would be given to a
medical student working for a shadowy British organization. In fact,
try to imagine the assorted nations of earth, particularly the ones
listed, agreeing to let anyone else have control. (It's
interesting to note that Russia and its thousands of nuclear weapons
seem to be exempted from this arrangement, as well as Israel. They're
probably the stubborn countries who don't want to play nice.) So she
somehow has total control, except only so far as she can hang around
her Blackberry in order to press "no" every time it asks "Do you want
to play global thermonuclear war?"

Birds sing. People applaud.
Officers snog. I cringe.

Some people have cited the "atmospheric converter" as just another
RTD/Helen Raynor deus-ex-machina solution to all of our problems. I
don't think it quite falls into that category, but they sure could have
let us onto it a little earlier. In the The Sontaran Stratagem,
the Doctor has the opportunity to gurn about Luke's lab, excited at all
the nice terraforming toys he had to play with. You'd think that would
be a fine time to mention an "atmospheric converter." As for what it
did (essentially just start the clone-food on fire), as I mentioned,
that isn't particularly appalling to me...but some of the details on
how they handled it were. Did you see how fast that stuff went? That
fire propagates around the entire world in less than a minute. This is fast.
We're talking, like, sonic boom fast. Maybe if they get it to burn
around the world backwards and fast enough they can make time go in
reverse ("everyone get down! Time is reversing!") like in Superman.
Strangely, however, when the flaming sky is burning its way past, say,
the Empire State Building or the Valiant, it's just crawling along.
And then the worst bit is how it all clears up. Instantly. It's
calm. Blue skies staring at you. No dust is sucked up into massive
mushroom clouds or any of that. Birds sing. People applaud.
Officers snog. I cringe. The scientific implausibility of this is bad
enough...but the worst part about it is how nauseatingly clichéd and
obnoxiously, hollowly uplifting it is. If this had been the actual climax of the episode, I'd have been much more disappointed, but fortunately when this is over, we still had to deal with...

The Littlest Sontaran:

Last week, in my review for The Sontaran Stratagem, I bemoaned the inevitable redemption of the boy genius. I thought for sure Rattigan would inevitably see the error of his ways, decide killing the rest of the human race was just too horrible, stop being a Collaborator, and then jump ship to help the Doctor save the planet. I'm pleased to note that things turned out better than I feared. Luke became an enemy of the Sontarans not because of some sort of moral salvation, but because the Sontarans betrayed him. The closest thing he got to redemption was revenge.

While I thought perhaps his temper-tantrum, when the other members of The Bloodhound Gang in their red hoodies refused to play an impromptu game of space explorer with him as the world asphyxiated, was a bit over-the-top, I enjoyed watching Rattigan's world crumble around him. From his displays of cocksure arrogance ("It's time I made a move, sir...I have soldiers of my own.") to his panic at the defection of his gang ("I'm cleverer than everyone...you hear
me?? I'm clever!") to learning of his betrayal ("but you promised!") to the final insult of the Doctor casually emasculating him ("If I see one more gun..."), the Decline and Fall of Luke Rattigan was a wonder to behold.

...I have no doubt that the Doctor would have ultimately pressed the
button after giving the Sontarans his obligatory eighteen or twenty
chances to surrender...

Despite Luke's seeming impotence, however, the biggest irony of the episode is that General Staal succeeded in making him into a better Sontaran than most, including Commander Skorr (star of AIP's "I Was a Teenage Sontaran"), who, despite his own youthful glee about battle, might as well have just thrown himself in front of a bus. Luke, on the other hand, was not only unafraid to die in battle, but when he does his "something clever" he glories in taking his betrayers down with him. While I have no doubt that the Doctor would have ultimately pressed the button after giving the Sontarans his obligatory eighteen or twenty chances to surrender, deep down he was keeping hope alive that the Sontarans just might manage to come around to his wholly un-Sontaran solution; Luke, on the other hand, didn't give a rat's ass about offering them the option, and although Luke's substitution may have been predictable, it was so well executed (no pun intended) that I couldn't help but grin happily as he yelled "Sontar-ha!" at a bunch of dumbfounded Sontarans.

The Secret Weapon:

Five episodes into Series 4 and Catherine Tate is continuing her tour-de-force performance as the Doctor's most well-constructed companion. Although she's required to lay on the emotion a little heavy with Bernard Cribbins, as usual, and we have to deal with too many scenes of Sylvia being annoying (what is with RTD and making every companion's mother a godawful harpy? Even the one in The Sarah Jane Adventures is dim as a post and thoroughly unlikeable), she once again manages to imbue her character with wit, convincing emotion, and genuine likeability. And I think the scriptwriters even managed to avoid having her say "dumbo" in this one.

Among the highlights this time around are the scene where the Doctor gives Donna her own key to the TARDIS, which contrasts nicely with the way it's been handled with the other companions: "maybe we'll get sentimental after the world's finished choking to death," and her heroic turn on the Sontaran space station where she's largely on her own sabotaging teleporters and tattooing Sontarans' Diocese on the backs of their necks.

That Appalling Mongrel Dialect:

The Poison Sky, despite all its faults, provided some excellent screen-chewing opportunities for David Tennant. Best among these is probably the conference call he sets up with General Staal posing as a diplomat. This provides some excellent exchanges between the Doctor, Staal and Colonel Mace. Tennant should get more of these opportunities to lay into his enemies. In addition to managing some exposition in a less clumsy manner than unconvincing news-anchors, and being generally highly entertaining, this short interlude includes as a bonus a reference to the war with the Rutans and no less than two allusions to The Two Doctors.

While much of UNIT was rather large and unwieldly, what with their platoons of junior-college soldiers and lorry full of computers (I miss the good old days, when they were about the size of Torchwood's Cardiff branch and they were lucky if they had silverware), I rather enjoyed the Doctor's interactions with Colonel Mace. His sort of put-upon-ness and attempts to retain some sort of control while being clearly out-of-his-depth actually remind me of the Brigadier (much more so than anything else about UNIT 2008 reminds me of anything about UNIT 1970's-or-80's), and as a result he gets most of the best interactions with Tennant. From the without-any-missed-beats "Are you my mummy?" to the Doctor's sheepish denial of "Getting a taste for it" to the Colonel's McCrimmonesque reaction to the Doctor's "diplomacy", the chemistry between Mace and the Doctor is top-notch. I hope they bring him back and make him a regular Brigadier-type foil for the Doctor for years to come (in the 2010's-or-20's).

One last Tennant line deserving mention is the Doctor's reaction to the TARDIS going missing (again): "I'm stuck on earth, like...like an ordinary person...like a human. How rubbish is that? Sorry, no offense, but come on!"

Choking on it:

It would seem that, as the evidence piles up, that Helen Raynor has clear strengths and weaknesses in her writing. Much like RTD, she seems to have a bit of a knack for those witty one-liners and humorous reparteé, but her more "emotional" bits are laid on with a trowel, and heaven forfend she try to shoehorn her "message" awkwardly into the plot. I'm all for politicizing fiction, subtly or otherwise, but it has to done with some degree of finesse and it has to make some sort of sense, or we get humans and pig-slaves living together in connubial bliss. (That's why it happens in all those shitty Ayn Rand books.)

...how did they manage to script you to be simultaneously thick and two-dimensional?

"All those things they said about pollution and ozone and carbon....they're really happening, aren't they?" Uh...no, Sylvia, that dreadful fog was from an alien plot to destroy the earth; how did they manage to script you to be simultaneously thick and two-dimensional? Sure, pollution, ozone and carbon are still, uh, "happening", and cars are still 800 million poisonous death machines spread across the globe, but that really wasn't the central motivation of the plot, and making that the moral of the story just sort of feels like you're peeing it in my eye.

The Undefeated:

Although it seems like only last week the Doctor described the Sontarans as "The Finest Soldiers in the Galaxy", and he spent much of The Poison Sky screaming about how UNIT can't possibly fight them, the Sontarans don't appear to be much cop when their oponents actually have working weapons. Sure, Skorr is having a gay old time shooting UNIT's grunts in the face while their weapons don't work...he's like Dick Cheney at a quail hunt. But, deal with the copper-excitation problem and a gang of Ritalin-addled Girl Guides could hold the Sontarans down and give them noogies until the cows come home. Once Mace has made his little speech about how indomitable the human race is or whatever, the Death Star shows up to blow away all the fog and fire lasers at the factory, UNIT attacks with its shiny new
bullets, and apparently the incredible warriors turn
out to be sort of rubbish. No wonder the Rutans have been holding them at a draw for fifty thousand years.

The Two Marthas:

And, finally, once again, Martha is the soaring eagle sucked through the jet engines of Doctor Who as Freema Agyeman continues her downward spiral. In her short visit to Torchwood
she was less lively than the dead character, and that continues here.
Whether it's Evil Martha's piss-poor attempt to deceive the Doctor or
Less-than-Evil Martha's general blandness, she keeps coming up shorter
than...well, than Sontarans.

...for fuck's sake.

The weakest Martha Moment in The Poison Sky would be the
scene when Good Martha encounters Evil Martha and they commune over
shared memories. It was so cringe-inducingly over-sentimental and
amateurly acted that I wished Martha coming in contact with Antimartha
would have resulted in their mutual annihilation and an explosion big
enough to be heard in Seville. Overbearingly sappy music and
dreadfully pretentious scripting don't help matters: Evil Martha's
final line is "Martha Jones...all that
life!", for fuck's sake.

At the end-of-episode cliffhanger, as the doors slam shut and the
Doctor's disembodied hand begins to froth and sputter like an agitated
otter, the Doctor delivers his obligatory "What?! What?!" Realizing
that we're going to be saddled with not-Evil Martha for
who-knows-how-many more stories, I was left shouting "Why?! Why?!"

May 03, 2008

If there's one significant gammy-leg hamstringing The Sontaran Stratagem, the leaden albatross around its neck, if you will, it's Martha Jones. Last year I rather thought that Freema Agyeman was a rather capable actor, despite the fact that the scriptwriting required her to do nothing much beyond pine after the Doctor. My misgivings were stirred up some after her miserable evangelism in The Last of the Time Lords, but, again, I thought incompetent writing was the culprit. Perhaps my judgement during the last series was impaired (by the opiates, no doubt), or perhaps having to appear on three entire episodes of Torchwood sucked away the last of her energy and creativity, because from the moment the cellular rings in the TARDIS Agyeman is, literally, phoning in her performance.

Both the character and the performance in The Sontaran Stratagem are so uninspired that during the scene where Martha is examining the mindless Polish automaton I almost had difficulty telling the two of them apart. From her thoroughly unconvincing argument about "So I've got to work from the inside, and by staying inside maybe I stand a chance of making them better," to the cramp-inducing melodramatics of her discussion about her family with Donna ("I didn't tell my family, kept it all so secret. it almost destroyed them."), Martha's character is a combination of wide-eyed, stilted emoting and forgettable droning.

Ironically, Agyeman stops sleepwalking through her part only when the real Martha goes to sleep. In addition to cloning Martha and her hair, they apparently cloned some extra personality, as the Evil Martha displays significantly more than the original.

Perhaps another reason that Agyeman fails to even leave much of an impression in The Sontaran Stratagem is that she has to share the episode with the unstoppable dramatic juggernaut that is Catherine Tate.

In what is getting to be disturbingly predictable, I was once again impressed by Tate's performance. Whether in comedic scenes (flying the TARDIS, complete with "denting the eighties" joke) or meatier material, Tate is proving to have the acting chops to pull it out of the fire. Even the worst of the treacly, tear-jerking bits, such as the scene where Tate returns home, can't keep a good actress down. Sure, that scene was marred by Murray Gold's aural atrocities and gratuitous use of flashbacks, but you can't blame her for that.

Part of what makes Donna so much more engaging a companion for the Doctor than either Martha or Rose is that she treats him as an equal, rather than gazing at him all glassy-eyed from episode to episode. A character trait I wish more people had, Donna clearly has no respect for authority. She has no reservations about referring to him as a "prawn" and making him feel like an idiot during the scene when he thinks she's leaving him. Likewise she has no compulsions about standing up to the folks in UNIT, not hesitating to draw comparisons to Guantanamo Bay and demanding a salute from Colonel Mace.

(An Aside: I think the fact that Donna is flying the TARDIS at the beginning of the episode and the seemingly-comical over-sentimentality of her return home could be an indication that The Sontaran Stratagem doesn't follow immediately from Planet of the Ood, and there may be other un-televised "adventures" that took place betwixt the two stories; you'd think she'd have flashbacks about those, too, however.)

With the exception of Jacqueline King's Sylvia Noble, who continues to come off far more as caricature than character, the assorted supporting performers seem to have acquitted themselves quite admirably. The talk over the kitchen table continues to show the good chemistry (and bad music) betwixt Tate and the returning Bernard Cribbins, but of special note are Ryan Sampson as the boy genius and Christopher Ryan as Napoleon. While Sampson's Luke Rattigan initially comes across as sort of a pompous git leading a street gang of maths students in red hoodies, his excitable boyish enthusiasm ("Is he...is he goin' in the water?? I love it with the water!") in the latter half of the program makes him a little more realistic as a teenager. I also enjoyed the father-son type relationship he has with Staal; the two actors play off of each other well, like in the poignant little scene looking out over the Earth and the exchange about how "cool" it is to kill 52 people in the same second.

My main concern, of course, is that we'll get Rattigan's redemption in part two as he reconsiders his role in the destruction of Earth. If there's one thing worse than super-genius kids who plots to destroy all of humankind, it's super-genius kids who plots to destroy all of humankind but then doesn't have the spine for it.

While I tend to feel that the entire Stratagem didn't seem particularly, well, Sontaran (though the Doctor notes as much), I was generally pleased with the way they handled the reintroduction of another classic series villain, and I think Ryan's General Staal was spot-on. His dismissing the Doctor's attempt to sabotage the teleporter as "Primitive sonic trickery!" before fixing it with a zap of his magic
wand was sheer brilliance, especially given the endless debates in these parts about how powerful the Sonic Scwoodwivah has become. I even enjoyed the scripts explanation for the probic vents. In a parallel to his young human charge, Staal seemed almost almost pouty about not being allowed to be a part The Last Great Time War. The Mill's work with the Sontaran satellite and attack-marbles was
also quite excellent, as was much of the design of the Sontarans themselves. It's more of a testament to Ryan that he managed to give such a good performance through all of that armor and prosthetics.

The dialogue was frequently sparkling, especially in all of the scenes at and near the Academy with the repartee betwixt the Doctor and Staal and Rattigan (and Ross, also: "It's all a bit Hitler Youth. Exercise at dawn and classes and special diets.") Ross was easily the best thing about UNIT, though I also sort of enjoyed the back and forth between the Doctor and Colonel Mace about guns and salutes and orders. Other than that UNIT was pretty much rubbish, Martha included, but even that had a certain Old Skool charm about it. I still miss when they were more homespun, and there were about six of them.

If I'm looking for another major gripe to make about The Sontaran Stratagem, it would have to be the inappropriately hamfisted music. I've never been one to harp on about Murray Gold's bludgeoning musical scores, but this episode pushed the bounds of good taste. The most egregious violation, of course, was during Donna's aforementioned multiple-flashback-laden return home to see her family, but during any of the theoretically-emotional portions of the episode, such as the Doctor's reunion with Martha and her weepy "My family was tortured!" drivel.

I try not to think too much about Helen Raynor's previous contribution to Doctor Who, but I seem to recall that the first half of her last two-parter featuring iconic aliens from the classic series was cracking good stuff, only to be forcibly sodomized by Evolution of the Daleks. As a result, I'm a little apprehensive about what we can expect from The Poison Sky. If The Sontaran Stratagem is any indication, Raynor has shown that she can write witty, light-hearted, humourous exchanges, such as the highly-entertaining scenes when the Doctor is dealing with Rattigan and Staal at the Academy. On the other hand, maybe she'd be better off avoiding anything that rings of the sodden emotional crap that has pretentious miscues such as "He's like fire. Stand too close and people get burned." I'm also concerned that neither she nor the script editors have considered running their scripts past an average chip-shop employee in order to catch any inaccuracies introduced by their utter lack of understanding of science. Nonetheless, I'm remaining cautiously optimistic about the upcoming "Part Two", because, in the end, The Sontaran Stratagem was yet another highly entertaining slab of television.

And that's the most frustrating thing of all. It's much easier to write an entertaining review for the really bad episodes. In order to make my review interesting I've had to make my own graphics (and no one even noticed it on my Planet of the Ood review), whereas in the past I've mostly gotten away with an endless litany of snide remarks and bitter scathing attacks about the nonsensical plot, inadequate grasp of basic science, messianic tendencies, poor acting, and general rubbishness of it all. Is it too late to go back and review those Torchwood episodes?